


The Life These Travelers Chose

by J (j_writes)



Category: Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-22
Updated: 2012-08-22
Packaged: 2017-11-12 15:24:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/492705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/j_writes/pseuds/J
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim followed his gaze and tried to imagine a universe where Tony Stark still had his feet firmly planted on the ground.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Life These Travelers Chose

**Author's Note:**

> a little snippet from an incredibly self-indulgent AU in which earth discovers alien life in the late 80s and the trajectory of Stark Industries and SHIELD are thrown slightly off course.

"Do you ever give any thought to the idea of multiple universes?" Dr. Banner asked, settling down heavily by Jim's side, and Jim looked at him over his glass.

"Should have figured you'd be an introspective drunk," he said. "Sounds more like Dr. Foster's area of expertise than mine."

Banner shrugged. "I tried her first." He gestured toward her across the room, surrounded by a couple of lab types Jim didn't recognize. "I lost her point about thirty seconds in. I'm not positive she had one."

Jim tipped his head back against the window and considered it for a few moments. "Multiple universes diverging at what point?" he asked, and Banner raised his eyebrows.

"'89," he said simply. "Say that transmission never came through. Say Asgard and the Nine Realms stayed unknown to us for another twenty years, another thirty. Say we lived in a world where mankind still had never made extraterrestrial contact."

Jim finished off his drink and set his glass aside. "I can't see much going differently for either of us," he said. "You'd still be in a lab," he decided, "and I'd still be in uniform."

"Probably, yeah," Banner agreed. His eyes traveled across the room until they caught on Tony, draped around Thor, regaling the people around them with some story that had them in peals of laughter. "And him?"

Jim followed his gaze and tried to imagine a universe where Tony Stark still had his feet firmly planted on the ground.  
______________

In '89, the night the news came down, he was with Tony. He was called up the next day, but that night it was the two of them, drunk on Tony's rooftop deck, the phone cord stretched to its limits so they could sprawl on their backs and pass the phone between them, talking to Pepper while they stared up at the stars.

Jim woke sometime in the hours between too late and too early to a pile of papers blowing into his face, Tony chasing after them and gathering them protectively, tucking them under Jim's leg before returning to scribbling schematics half on a crumpled page and half on his arm. 

By the time Jim got into uniform in the morning, Stark Industries had entered the space travel business.  
_______________

"SHIELD let you do that often?" Jim asked as JARVIS let him into Tony's workshop.

"JARVIS, what did I tell you about letting in visitors unannounced?" Tony asked from somewhere under a table on the left.

"I believe the last word was that Colonel Rhodes hadn't been considered a guest since my coding was barely a twinkle in your eye, sir, and that he was perfectly capable of getting his own damn coffee," JARVIS replied mildly. "If you would like to reconfigure his security designation – "

"That won't be necessary, JARVIS," Jim said. "I brought him a project to work on."

He stepped into the circle of robot arms in the center of the room, and let them extract him from his suit. Tony's head popped up from behind a workbench, lighting up. He crossed the room with barely a glance at Jim and started running his fingers along the seams, checking for damage. "How's she running?" He asked.

"Why?" Jim replied. "Going to offer me an upgrade?"

"Not likely. But if you're going to be flying around in my tech, it damn well better be in fighting shape, stolen or not."'

"Borrowed," Jim corrected.

"That implies you plan to return it." Tony gave the suit a dubious look. "I don't think I want it back, now that your NASA goons have been fucking around with it for a few months. You think I can't see those Hammer parts? Because I see them." His voice dropped lower, and he mumbled half to himself and half to the suit as he checked it over. "JARVIS," he added eventually, raising his voice again, "I want you to do a full diagnostic workup on her before we let Rhodey get in the air again."

Jim opened his mouth to protest, but was cut off neatly by JARVIS replying, "Understood, sir," and the suit blinking to life on its own, helmet slamming down.

"SHIELD doesn't _let_ me do anything," Tony said belatedly, humming to himself as he pulled up the blueprints of Jim's suit and hovered them around it.

"Including throwing parties on their carrier?" Jim asked, raising an eyebrow. 

Tony scoffed. "That wasn't a party," he replied. "You've _seen_ me throw a party. That wasn't it. That was just – " he waved a hand. "Having a few drinks, letting off some steam." He paused. "It's possible that Fury got a very nice bottle of scotch out of the deal." At Jim's raised eyebrow, he shrugged. "Man's been on this carrier a long time, Rhodey, with no one but his Director of Flight Operations for company." He made a few adjustments to the suit's schematics, then glanced through them at Jim. "Speaking of," he added. "How long are you around?"

"Not," Jim replied succinctly. 

Tony met his eyes. "You should blow off whatever you're about to go do," he said. 

Jim sighed. It was an old argument, a tired one. He turned his back on Tony and crossed to the couch, flopping down onto it. "I'm not leaving NASA, Tony."

"You should let SHIELD recruit you."

"SHIELD doesn't recruit guys like me."

Tony raised an eyebrow. "Just guys like me?"

"Like you, and Barton, and Romanoff. Banner. Foster. Odinson." Jim let his mouth curve into a smile. "Not one good soldier in the bunch."

"Rogers."

Jim made a face. "Digging a guy out of the ice isn't exactly a recruitment strategy."

"Coulson was a soldier."

"Coulson was _Fury's_ soldier."

Tony looked at him from under his eyelashes. "Some people around here say you're mine."

"Yeah?" Jim let his head fall back. "Not entirely untrue. But I learned a long time ago how to split my loyalties. That's another thing SHIELD doesn't look too kindly on." He looked at Tony sideways. "Since when did you start playing the part of the company man, anyway?"

Tony shrugged. "That's not – " he began, but he cut himself off, eyes narrowing. "What – " he gestured at the holograms of Jim's suit for a moment or two, frowning deeply, and then his eyes snapped up to catch Jim's. "Why," he said, his voice low and dangerous, "have your heat shields been disabled?"

"What?" Jim frowned. "Oh. They haven't, they've just been in need of some tweaking for a while, and – "

Tony rounded on him. "A while?" he demanded. "You've been flying without them for two weeks, and whoever tried to patch them did a piss-poor job of it. Either the US military is trying to get you killed," he said, "or you are. I can't say I like either idea any better than the other."

Jim sighed. "We didn't exactly think that reentry procedures were going to be a priority on this mission, Tony," he said evenly.

Tony made an impatient noise. "They should _always_ be a priority, Rhodey," he said. "I don't care how likely you think it is that you're getting a ride home, you can't just - "

"And how well equipped was the Mk I for atmospheric conditions?" Jim interrupted him. "Jesus, Tony. I know what that suit looked like when you crashed it in the desert. You were about a sheet of tinfoil away from returning to Earth as a pile of ash."

"Sometimes a sheet of tinfoil's all it takes, and you're flying without even that much right now. Don't fuck me around on this one, Rhodes. You have a problem with the suit, you come to me, you hear me? Not to some third-rate mechanic on some backwater moon someplace."

Jim stifled a sigh. "I'm here, aren't I?"

"This pit stop was on your flight plan, was it? Because I've got to say, Pepper's pretty good at letting me know when you're going to be in the same solar system as us, and I haven't heard word one about you in weeks."

"Oddly enough, the CEO of Stark Industries isn't exactly notified of every secret mission that NASA flies. Hard as it may be for you to believe, Tony, your company is not the be-all and end-all of the armed space program."

"So I hear. How _have_ the Hammer drones been working out for you guys, anyway?" There was a gleam in Tony's eye that Jim knew too well. 

"Did you have anything useful to share?" Jim asked. "Other than the fact that I'm apparently traveling the universe in a flying deathtrap?"

"Nope," Tony replied. "Flying deathtrap pretty much covers it."

Jim waved a hand at the suit. "Fix that, then, would you?"

"Already on it," Tony said. He collapsed onto the couch beside Jim. "Because knowing you, you're going to get called out of here on some bullshit mission in the middle of the night, and you're going to fry yourself in atmo trying to get back to Earth."

They fell quiet, and Tony filled the silence by crossing to the bar and pouring them both a drink. Jim drank his slowly, relaxing into the couch and listening to JARVIS tinkering away at his suit. "So you've got Pepper checking up on me," he said finally, as Tony settled into the couch beside him.

"You never call, you never write…" Tony said with exaggerated plaintiveness. "Anyway, I think she just wants you to keep making sure that SHIELD isn't corrupting me while the Tower's being renovated. I'm pretty sure she's starting to get worried I'm going to stay here."

"Are you?" Jim asked, and Tony didn't answer, just shot him a withering look. "She hasn't got a suit of her own yet, so she can come check up on you herself?"

"Don't be jealous, you're still the only one with that distinct honor," Tony assured him. "And only because you stole it."

"NASA would have forcibly bought you out the way they did Hammer," Jim told him. "I did you a favor."

Tony cast a rueful look over the suit. "Some favor," he said dryly. "I could just keep it, you know."

"And you could have kept me from getting my hands on it in the first place," Jim pointed out. "You didn't."

"No," Tony agreed. "I didn't." He left that there for a moment before adding, "In my defense, I was dying at the time."

"No excuse," Jim said, nudging Tony's leg with his own. "You're just going to have to face the fact that you're not the only guy with a badass suit flying around this universe anymore."

"Just as long as it's just you, and you don't start retroengineering them for every space tourist yahoo with a few million to throw your way," Tony replied.

"Yeah, well," Jim began, but he left the joke there unfinished, because _look at what happened the first time I brought_ you _into space_ was a little too pointed, a little too on the nose, even for them, and the glow of the arc reactor between them made it for him anyway. "I was talking to Dr. Banner last night," he said instead, abruptly changing the subject, and was interested to see Tony's face brighten a little at the mention.

"I keep angling to get him to stay on the carrier full-time, but being in space makes him anxious," Tony said.

"Can you blame him?" Jim asked.

"No, but I can build him a damn fine reinforced lab in the Tower, which is exactly what I've got Pepper's guys working on as we speak," Tony said, grinning.

"You're going to steal all Fury's best people out from under his nose, aren't you?"

"As many as I can carry, yeah," Tony agreed. He reconsidered. "He can keep the pilots, actually. I'm all the manned flight crew that I need, thank you very much."

"I'm sure Barton and Romanoff would be relieved to hear it," Jim replied dryly. 

"What did Bruce have to say?" Tony prompted, reaching for his drink. "Raving about my brilliance, I assume?"

"Brilliance, madness, it's all the same, right?" Jim asked. He smiled, looking towards the porthole out into space. "Actually, he was talking about alternate universes."

Tony raised an eyebrow. "Sounds like kind of washy science, coming from him."

Jim shrugged. "If anyone's going to entertain the thought, it'd be that guy, right? You have to think, if things had worked out a little different, maybe he'd be..." He hesitated. "A little more suited to working on a spacecraft," he finally went with.

"Guess so, yeah." Tony eyed him speculatively for a moment or two. " _You'd_ be the same in any universe. Self-appointed conscience to the heir to the Stark fortune, military tattooed onto your bones, royal pain in the ass who gets off on stealing my shit."

"Sounds about right," Jim agreed easily. "And you…" He shifted against the couch, letting Tony lean heavily against his side. "You'd still just be Tony Stark."

" _Just_?" Tony repeated, his indignant huff warming Jim's skin through his shirt, and Jim grinned and didn't reply.

"I don't know," Tony said after a while, his eyes on Dummy and JARVIS puttering around Jim's suit. "Maybe, a world like that...maybe it wouldn't be so different, really."

"Maybe not," Jim agreed, and they sat there together, watching the workshop turn colors as below them, an unfamiliar sun rise over a planet not their own.  
______________

"You take care of her this time," Tony told him severely before slamming the helmet down on Jim's suit as they stood in the airlock of the SHIELD carrier, and Jim nodded as his screens booted up.

"I will," he promised. "Only the finest Hammer parts for your baby." 

"Don't even _joke_ about that," Tony growled. He circled around Jim, checking the seams and connections, and then rapped the suit on the head with a metal glove. "And you take care of him, too," he told it. "Don't let him be any more of a dumbass than he has to."

"Likewise," Jim shot back as Tony closed his own helmet. 

"I'm _far_ too intelligent to ever be a dumbass," Tony informed him, and clanked his metal arm companionably against Jim's side as the airlock opened and the endless sky appeared ahead of them. 

Jim saluted in Tony's direction, and Tony waved him off, giving him a solid push towards the door. They powered up at the same time, Tony shooting off faster and harder, laughing in Jim's ear as he soared briefly downward, and then in the direction of the Tower construction site. Jim angled in the opposite direction, towards Earth, and by the time he looked back, he could no longer distinguish Tony's light from that of the stars.


End file.
